Next is attempting to determine the geographical location of its customers, probably in order to determine (1) if it's worthwhile to build new stores in other locations, (2) whether customers from different postcodes do indeed have different purchase/refund habits, (3) whether it's worthwhile to do unaddressed (door-drops, I think they are called in the UK) mailings in particular postcodes. From the point of view of a mass merchandiser, collecting this data on an individual identified basis in order to "blacklist" you would be a waste of time and money and in fact not good business. Even customers who return things can be profitable sooner or later and a customer who returns things is cheaper to keep than to replace. A certain percentage of sales are always budgeted to be returned for valid or invalid reasons and these projections are generally pretty accurate for an experienced company.
Where Next has messed up, and this is where smart businesses have learned data protection principles are helpful, is to ignore customer sensitivity about what is in fact "unnecessary data collection". Telling people why you are doing something and making participation optional pleases the customer. We have a chain of electronic stores, Radio Shack, which is notorious for asking for your phone number and I know people, myself included, who will go buy stuff elsewhere because they don't want this kind of hassle and don't trust them.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
All archives of messages are stored permanently and are
available to the world wide web community at large at
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/data-protection.html
If you wish to leave this list please send the command
leave data-protection to [log in to unmask]
All user commands can be found at : -
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/help/commandref.htm
(all commands go to [log in to unmask] not the list please)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
